Blood Royal (2 page)

‘Is this for me?’ she said, touching the Duke’s arm and indicating the casket with a nod. ‘How beautiful …’ and she bent her neck for the Duke to lower the jewel over her head. Startled, but still chuckling, the Duke reached out for the necklet, murmured, ‘Thank you, Owain,’ and leaned over her to do his courtly duty. She was aware of the English page with the name that wasn’t English at all scrambling to his feet and moving quickly away, free at last now his master had dismissed him. She could imagine the ache in his knees; she hoped he was grateful.

Then she concentrated on the English Duke’s thick, corded neck and the giant fingers fumbling over the chased gold at her throat. Thomas of Clarence was rather like a bull with a ring through his nose, she thought, a little smugly: dangerously strong, but quite easy to steer once you had a hold of the ring. Would his brother, the King of England – now, just possibly, her future husband – be as amenable? She hoped so. But she also found herself hoping Henry of England wouldn’t have that thick neck and pop eyes and grizzling temple, and that he wouldn’t wear the muddy, dull greens and browns that these Englishmen were all covered in. Letting her mind flit off to a future in which an archbishop put the crown of England on her head, in a blaze of candlelight and jewels, the husband her imagination sketched in was as young as she was. He was tall and slender and lithe; with dark blue eyes and floppy black hair and a shy, adoring smile.

The ducal fumbling seemed to take a very long time.

The first time she glanced up, she saw her little brother Charles, looking very pale and much younger than his twelve years, stumbling out of the hall past Louis and into the corridor, where she could just see Christine de Pizan beckoning to him from the shadows. She hoped that meant Charles was going to be fed. Neither of the royal children had been fed all day. She was suddenly achingly hungry herself now she remembered how long it was since she’d last eaten. But Christine was as loyal and busy as a terrier, and good at gingering up the sullen, scary servants into making them meals. And perhaps Charles would save some of the food for her for later.

The second time she glanced up, as the Duke muttered ‘There!’ in a kind of thick-fingered triumph, she was relieved to see Louis had vanished too. There was no one in the doorway but men-at-arms.

TWO

It was sundown before Christine de Pizan got out to the palace gatehouse. She’d managed to persuade the Queen’s cook to part with some bits of meat and bread for the two youngest royal children, since their own cook was nowhere to be seen (which was unsurprising, perhaps; the children’s servants hadn’t been paid for two months, since the King’s latest bout of illness began, and you couldn’t rely on the Queen for anything). Suppressing the rage she habitually felt when she saw how that idle, self-indulgent Bavarian schemer let her own youngest son and daughter be neglected, Christine had tucked an unusually quiet Charles into bed. Catherine, she supposed, was still in the audience hall. She’d made Charles promise to save his sister some meat. Neither Christine nor the boy had had the heart to mention the proposed abomination of an English marriage that the Queen had just so shamefully accepted.

Christine was really only supposed to read with the Prince and Princess – to guide their minds. That was a natural appointment for someone who’d written as much as she had, to the acclaim of all Europe, about how princes should be educated. But, whenever their father was in the grip of his demons, Christine also found herself going every day to the Hotel Saint-Paul, the garden palace their grandfather had built just inside his new city walls, to the cobwebby children’s annex and their mother’s overheated, parrot-filled, sweetmeat-loaded
quarters, where Christine’s only role was to play nursemaid-cum-mother: making sure they had enough to eat, and clothes to wear. It wrought havoc on her concentration and disrupted her writing and the direction of her manuscript-copying workshop. But how could she do anything less? She was grateful to poor, kindly, afflicted King Charles for letting her live out her life in France – she’d had no desire, when she was widowed, to go back to Venice – and for showing her such favour over the years. And she felt sorry for him, in his troubles, and sorry for the children too. So quiet, the pair of them, as if neglect had withered their tongues (though Christine had noticed that Catherine, at least, was now becoming resourceful enough to marshal what she needed in the way of food and friends even without words; using the wistful looks and ways of a girl coming to her adult beauty to charm the people she needed. And she’d risen to the occasion today, all right, with a quip that had pleased everyone).

But this wasn’t the time to worry about little Charles and Catherine. All Christine had time to feel now was anxiety on her own account. She whisked her wiry body briskly towards the head guard. How had it got so late? Outside the Hotel Saint-Paul, she could already see a glitter of red on the river, up past the Island and the old royal palace and Notre Dame Cathedral. Night was dangerous. The men were ready to close the gatehouse, locking the inhabitants inside for safety.

‘You’re late,’ one of them said roughly to her.

‘It’s only ten minutes’ walk to my house,’ she said firmly back. ‘You know I live just nearby.’

The man shook his head doubtfully. They all knew the figures: ten bodies a night delivered to the morgue at the Louvre. Ten throats cut on the streets after honest folk were supposed to be inside and asleep. Paris was a frightening place these days, even now, when things were relatively quiet.

‘I have to get home,’ she said. ‘I have children. Grandchildren. Work.’ She gestured down at her simple blue gown and laughed reassuringly, giving them her most flirtatious smile. It was
always best to use charm first, before letting the man know she meant business. Her smile had always melted hearts. ‘I don’t look worth robbing. You can see that. I’ll be all right.’ She wished the man would hurry and make his mind up to let her go. She didn’t want to be out at night either.

Suddenly the guard nodded, as if he’d just seen a way of killing two birds with one stone. ‘We’ve got an Englishman here who needs a bed for the night,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you out if you put him up. He’ll keep you safe.’

It would be crowded, but if they’d let her out she’d find a corner for a guest. Even an Englishman. She nodded. Brisk with relief, the guard whistled out a mule and handed her on to it. Christine recognised the young man holding the harness. He was tall but still hardly more than a boy – the black-haired page, or aide, or whatever he was, who’d held open the casket while the Duke of Clarence gave Princess Catherine her jewel. He had a big pack on his back and was wrapped, ready to go, in a cloak too heavy for the mild evening weather. He gave her a small, shy smile. He wouldn’t save her from any footpads, she saw. But at least he’d be no trouble.

She noticed the boy moving his head to stare at everything they passed. He stared at the great paved sweep of Saint Anthony Street, where fruit blossoms peeked over the walls of the Duke of Orleans’ home and the convent of Saint Catherine of the Schoolboys. Once inside the Saint Anthony gate, when they turned away from the river into narrower streets, where the paving stones stopped and the sound of the mule’s hoofs was muffled by ankle-deep filth, he gazed at the pink blossom waving over the King of Sicily’s home on one side and Little Saint Anthony convent on the other.

At first she thought he was scared, and listening for footsteps. She was, though she’d have died before admitting it. They passed the crowded space of the Jews’ road on one side, and more walls swaying with pink and white clouds, with more slender towers and spires rising behind the wafts of flowers, then came up to the Bishops of Beauvais’ hotel. As they reached the crossroads, she looked straight at him to
show him he had to turn the mule’s head to the left here, and she realised, from the alert, curious, joyful look on his face, that he wasn’t scared at all. He was just drinking in every detail of their surroundings. From the slightly raised ground here, you could see down to the Greve port. You could see the top of the crane that was used for unloading hay bales and the last speckles of glitter on the river. You could see the double towers of the cathedral, the turrets of the palace, and the dark green of the bare vineyards on the slopes of the Left Bank, with the University and church buildings scattered behind them up the hillsides, silhouettes in the dusk.

Because she was suddenly seeing it through his newcomer’s eyes, the sight humbled and amazed her as it hadn’t for years. She hardly ever remembered any more even what had made her write, in one of her most famous books, about the experience of coming here from Venice as a child, and about the extraordinary impression that her first months in Paris had made. She’d forgotten the beauty she lived amidst. These days, all she thought about in these streets was the troubles they all lived with. But look at this boy, staring. Paris must still be a dream, a miracle, to anyone who’d never seen or imagined two hundred thousand people living, working, singing, praying and thinking together.

‘I had no idea,’ the boy said, turning frank eyes to her, ‘no idea it would be like this.’ His French was accented but fluent. Taken aback by his warmth and openness, she almost smiled.

A dog barked somewhere near; something creaked. She jumped. There was no point in getting your throat cut just for the joy of exchanging pleasantries with an Englishman, she told herself. ‘Come on,’ she said gruffly. ‘Let’s get you inside.’

It was so dark by the time they stopped in Old Temple Street that they had to bang at the locked courtyard gate, and when Jean came out to let them in, he was carrying a lantern.

‘We were worried,’ he said, not noticing the visitor at the head of the mule, coming straight to her and slipping her off its back. His voice was quiet but she could feel the tension vibrating in it.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, tilting her head up, feeling the usual rush of wonder at his olive skin and black hair, the elegant slant of jaw and nose, the clean smell. Her son: the man her love with Etienne had made. The way he reminded her of Etienne, who’d been dead these twenty years now, brought a tragic undertone into her husky voice. ‘There was nothing I could do. Everything got late. There were visitors from England.’

Jean screwed up his face. He was no fonder of the present-day rulers of England than she was. Once, long ago, when Jean was just a boy, she’d sent him to England as pageboy to the old Earl of Salisbury. That had been a good placement for a boy who needed to make his way in the world. But the Earl had been killed soon after old King Richard was deposed. The new King of England –
so-called
King of England, she added fiercely to herself – who’d replaced Richard had wanted to keep young Jean de Castel, and even to get Christine to move to England to be with her son and light up his court with her writing. But she wasn’t having any truck with usurpers, and she’d had no intention of moving from civilisation to that damp wilderness over the water. So she’d sweet-talked that first Henry of Lancaster into sending her son back to France while she pretended to be making up her mind, and, eventually, she’d found Jean his place here in Paris. It was better the way things had worked out. They were together. Still, Christine and her son knew too much about the betrayals and bloodshed Henry of Lancaster had provoked to enjoy thinking of England. And they liked the idea of England even less now it was ruled by that Henry’s son – now Henry V – who, no sooner than he’d become King, had sent his brother over to France with an army to fight the French in Normandy, and who seemed to want to revive the old claim of the English kings to lands in France – which had been wrongful even when the kings were still rightful – to be the God-given rulers of France. The English were dangerous: king-killers, scavengers, wolves. This Henry was no kind of husband for Catherine. Anyone could see that.

‘What English visitors?’ Jean was asking, with the lantern flame reflected in his eyes.

‘The brother. The Duke of Clarence. With a proposal for our Princess Catherine to marry King Henry,’ Christine replied quickly, keeping her voice neutral.

Jean rolled his eyes. ‘I see,’ he said drily, raising his eyebrows, obviously not believing anyone could have taken such a proposal seriously, taking it as a cue for wry laughter. ‘And who did he talk to, if the King’s …’ Then he looked round, as if noticing the boy holding the mule’s head for the first time, and raised his eyebrows in a different, mute, cautious question.

‘This is a member of the Duke of Clarence’s entourage,’ Christine explained, still in her watchful public voice. Jean inclined his head at the newcomer – not quite a bow. The boy, grateful to be noticed at last, was already bowing eagerly and murmuring thanks for his bed in his fluent but guttural Anglo-Norman French. He was surprisingly tall. He towered over well-knit Jean.

‘They asked me to put him up here,’ she went on. ‘An Englishman …’ She turned to the boy with a question in her voice. ‘Owain Tudor,’ he said, and bowed again. But there was something unboyish in his eyes – a flicker of pain? Embarrassment? Grief? Pride? – as he added, with a slight twist of the lips: ‘Not English. I’m Welsh.’

They’d heard of the Welsh rebellion against King Henry, in the remote western Marches of England. Of course they had; France had supported the Welsh rebel, Owain Glynd?r, against the English usurper. A French army under the then chancellor, the Breton lord Jean de Rieux, had even spent a couple of years in Wales, once the Welsh leader had been crowned King Owain IV, leading three thousand Breton horsemen under the Welsh dragon flag. French and Welsh alike had been for old King Richard of England, already dead by then, rather than the king-killer Henry; it had all started from that. So Christine and her son knew that the uprising, which for a while had spread through the English aristocracy and turned even some of England’s greatest lords into mutineers, had nearly destroyed that Henry of England. The rebels had carved up England in
their minds, before they’d even won it: the Midlands to the Welsh, the South and West to the Mortimer lords of March; the north to the Percy clan. But the uprising had finally been defeated, even if its Welsh leader was still hiding out in the misty hills, raiding; even if he still called himself the King of Wales. So they looked at this youth in puzzlement as he told them that Owain Glynd?r, the rebel leader, was his cousin – King of the old Welsh royal house of Powys Magog, as the boy put it, not without pride, in his excellent French. If this boy was that rebel’s kinsman, what was he doing here, nicely dressed, in Paris, in the service of an English Duke?